Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Blogging was fun, and it broke the rules. As founder Nick Denton said in a 2013 interview, “The basic concept of Gawker was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day.” Which is another way of saying Gawker tried to harness…
There were thousands of fans in attendance at last week’s World Science Fiction Convention, but I swear that I kept seeing the same fifty faces. With the exception of a reading that I did with a few writers from Analog, all of my events revolved around the history of science fiction, which an emphasis on…
If I harvested all the essays I’ve written about plagiarism since the 1980s, there would be enough of them to make a fairly boring and incoherent book. But of all the cases I’ve read about or adjudicated — in a literary sense — none feels more perplexing to me than the case of Melania Trump….
Letters between Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer have attracted mockery. But artists will be artists, and at least the duo bravely ventured outside 140 characters to express themselves. There is, inevitably, a fair bit of snarking over the email exchange between Jonathan Safran Foer and Natalie Portman as captured in this weekend’s New York…
Barrier Status: ‘none’ George Shea, the emcee for the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, held at Coney Island, on the Fourth of July, believes that there are two main reasons that more than two and a half million people tune in to watch the event on television each summer. The first is the appeal of…
A few months ago, when J.K. Rowling released “A History of Magic in North America” on the Pottermore website, Native critics, scholars, readers and writers voiced their concerns with her appropriation of living traditions cherished by Native peoples. You can’t just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalized people. That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation @jk_rowling. —…
In his forthcoming book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” acclaimed journalist and nonfiction author Gay Talese chronicles the bizarre story of Gerald Foos, who allegedly spied on guests at his Colorado motel from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. But Talese overlooked a key fact in his book: Foos sold the motel, located in Aurora, Colo., in…
As I taught, I lived in a locked compound under complete surveillance: Every room was bugged, every class recorded. I scribbled down conversations as they happened and buried my notes in a lesson plan. I wrote at night, erasing the copy from my laptop each time I signed off, saving it to USB sticks…
In “The Wearing and Shedding of Enchanted Shoes,” Isabel Cardigos, Director of the Research Centre at the Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira in Portugal, wrote, “Shoes are paradoxical objects in that they constrict feet and yet free them to cover greater distances in space.” Indeed, fictional shoes enable “positive” transformation in women’s lives, but the…
In the summer of 2001, my family and I moved into the Prospect-Lefferts Garden neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I was 25. My partner was 24. Our son was 11 months. Prospect-Lefferts Garden is a lovely neighborhood marked by quiet streets and some of the most beautiful architecture in the city. There are several blocks…